Domestic violence victims must not be intimidated

For those of us who have been reading the papers the last couple of days, there are a lot of questions about what actually happened with David Johnson, the aide to Gov. Paterson who has been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. There are questions about contact that state officials had with his ex-girlfriend, who had initiated court proceedings to obtain an order of protection against him.

Despite some very serious and disturbing allegations, we don't yet know exactly what happened.

Regardless, we can learn from the outlines of the story. Because the sad truth is that - whether the batterer is famous or not, politically powerful or not - far too many victims of domestic violence are intimidated by their batterers or their friends and relatives from obtaining the justice and services they need and deserve.

At Safe Horizon, where we serve tens of thousands of domestic violence victims every year, our clients experience this all too often. The exact numbers aren't known - because it's impossible to measure how many people are suffering in silence.

But take a typical example - a woman who works as a receptionist. As her husband was punching her and yelling at her on a recent evening, not for the first time, neighbors called the police. She has begun the process of seeking an order of protection. Now she gets dozens of calls a day from the batterer, his friends and his brother, and she's not supposed to get personal calls at work. They accuse her of lying. They tell her no one will believe her. They threaten to tell her employer. They ask her how she can possibly do this to him, and say that she'll ruin his life. Sometimes her own family tells her the same thing.

For too many victims, this pressure culminates in deciding to live with the abuse and suffer in silence.

Over the past 40 years, domestic violence has evolved from an issue that didn't even have a name to a recognized problem that society addresses in many ways. This happened, first and foremost, because we defined the problem. Then we passed laws that recognize violence, even among intimate partners, for the crime that it is. Then we set up emergency systems like domestic violence shelters for people whose lives are in danger - and offered orders of protection to victims to make it harder for the abuser to harm them at work or at home.

At the same time, we began recognizing that victims have a range of needs beyond the criminal justice system and providing counseling and other supportive services to help them move toward a life free of violence and abuse.

But society still has a long way to go, and even if there were no official barriers to combating violence between intimate partners, many subtle, psychological and interpersonal barriers would still remain. Some people still have vestiges of that old thinking: That when one partner shoves or chokes or terrorizes another, it is essentially a private matter, rather than a violent crime.

If we can make some broader progress from this political crisis, and the earlier case of Hiram Monserrate, let it be an awareness that domestic violence victims should never be cowed into thinking of these crimes as a private matter to be swept under the rug.

A stunning 25% of women will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime. That means that all of us know, or will know, someone for whom this abuse is a terrible reality. Those victims must get the help that they need and deserve and those perpetrators should see justice. For that to happen, no one should make it harder for a victim to come forward.

Ariel Zwang is the chief executive officer of Safe Horizon, which runs New York City's Domestic Violence Hotline: (800) 621-HOPE.